Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. Michele Amitrano is nine when one hot summer day in 1978 he falls—literally—onto a boy his own age being held prisoner, chained in the bottom of a deep pit out in the country.

Michele is with a group of four or five kids from his village—including his five-year-old sister Maria—when he plummets out of a tree right onto the hidden pit, which is covered by a mattress and sheet of corrugated Fiberglas, but he decides at once not to tell any of them (“He was mine.

How, though, could Michele have known that changes at home—his truck-driver father having recently come back to stay instead of making more long hauls, for example—were connected with the bound and bloodied boy in the pit (Filippo Carducci by name, as Michele will learn from the TV news)? The arrival—as a houseguest, the children are told—of an old man named Sergio Materia, and then the gatherings of still other men, who argue angrily among themselves around the dining table into the wee hours—all are ominous signs. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege.

If Skull was bad, Felice was a thousand times worse”), he’s made to swear never to go back to the pit again, since if he does, his father says, Filippo will certainly be shot.It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….